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Travers spoke up now. “Okay, but before you go, I want you to look at the blueprints we have of the residence and point out any differences you see, and I want you to tell us anything that might help us if we do get the green light to enter the dormitory.”
Zack took the tablet, leaned against the counter of the pharmacy, and began trying to match what he’d seen in person to plans from nearly twenty years ago, and other plans from over sixty years ago.
Forty-five minutes later he left the pharmacy, walked to his car, and drove back to La Finca alone.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The old Soviet Lourdes Signals Intelligence headquarters building sat on the northern end of the University of Information Science, protected from the rest of the campus by a weathered but substantial concrete fence that made the building look like a prison. The entrance gate on the east side was normally locked and the area not patrolled by an exterior guard force, but tonight, about two hours earlier, the guards had arrived, the gates had been opened, and six tractor-trailers had pulled in, then followed the disused and weed-covered drive around to the back. Here, a massive bay door opened and, single file, all six vehicles crept down a ramp into a cavernous factory-like room the size of a football field.
There were workstations and tool chests and electrical wires and hydraulic piping around the room, similar to almost any factory, but the main feature was a pair of high-tech production lines, two rows, each with twelve red multi-jointed robot arms with articulating clamps and power drills and welding torches attached at the end. Each arm stood three meters high, and between the rows were open pathways, some forty meters in length.
Anton Hinton stood dressed in a red tracksuit with a white stripe, his hands on his hips, headphones over his ears, and an intense look on his face. In front of him, the six forty-foot containers were arrayed at the bottom of the ramp; the crates inside had all been removed by his staff with the aid of forklifts, each one then placed on an autonomous carrier bot, essentially large orange wheeled metal pallets with onboard computers that hived with all the other robots in the large manufacturing space.
Hinton watched while the carriers drove each crate to the rows of robot arms; the arms whizzed and purred, shifting left and right, using their grippers to remove items from the cases, scanning them with barcode readers, and then slowly assembling the devices as they passed by on the robotic carts.
Several of Hinton’s engineers and technicians stood by, watching the movement with rapt fascination.
Anton had been waiting for this day for years, ever since he’d acknowledged the fact that he had the ability, and moreover he had the responsibility, to create a new order in this world. And now, the day was here. This was just another stepping-stone on his path, of course; the world would not change overnight. But he knew that with each passing hour his vision would be more and more certain, because the means to stop it would have been made weaker and weaker.
His new army had arrived, and in no more than six to eight hours he would finally have enough platforms here to hold off virtually any attack should the Cubans decide to disrupt his operations here.
These machines would buy him time, and right now, time was what he needed more than anything else.
Eighty bipedal robots on top of the sixteen older models already in his possession, two hundred sixty of the most advanced Greyhound quadrupedal platforms, and four hundred Hornet kamikaze drones, all fully armed and charged.
With Cyrus in control of everything.
And Hinton in control of Cyrus.
His creation.
This had been his dream, and his dream was turning into reality, but Anton Hinton’s normal self-assurance was faltering tonight.
While he stood there worrying about that which was yet to come, Kimmie Lin stepped up next to him and dutifully waited for him to look her way.
He kept his eyes on the operations before him as he took off his headphones. “What do you think?”
She looked on at the assembly process: so much movement, the two-dozen arms twisting and contorting through their full range of motion, the carriers wheeling everything along slowly but steadily, the men continuing to place the crates on the empty carriers as they rolled up to each container.
She said, “Just as you promised.”
Anton nodded. “Yes. Nothing ever goes completely to plan, as we’ve seen this week. But we have adapted, and Cyrus is growing, proving himself every single minute of every single day.”
She turned back to him. “Yes…but is he growing stronger or simply more erratic?”
Anton brought his shoulders back. He was prepared to admit nothing to her about his doubts. “Stronger. The growing pains will cease; I’ll look back into the code and see to it.”
“The Americans,” Kimmie said. “They will come.”
He nodded. “I know. But by the time they get here, it will be too late.”
“The upload. It remains on schedule?”
The New Zealander kept his shoulders back, a smile on his face, and his tone positive as he said, “Actually, I’d like to delay it. No more than a few days. My engineers and I will go back and look at some things, rewrite some of the coding that has been trained out of its neural networks. Shouldn’t take long, and China will have a stronger product in the end.”
Kimmie nodded. “They won’t be pleased, but I agree, a healthy, stable Cyrus is the most important thing.”
She turned away and headed for the fabrication control room to look over manufacturing data, and Anton put his headphones back on.
